Through a Glass Darkly
by serenevil45
Summary: Female Severus Snape. The series left some questions. This is just filling in the blanks.


Spinner's End. That's where Tobias Snape decided to house his family. A small, tightly cramped, dirty hovel of an estate. That's what they called them here: the dismantlement of a household into something awkward, broken and inglorious. A fitting home for a woman who had the world at her feet and magic coursing through her veins and gave all of it up for a man she met who had none of those things and not even the faintest inclination to acknowledge the possibility of their existence.

The Snapes never talked much. Oh, they spoke, certainly, but it was like a radio programme or church sermon (of which Sev had only ever witnessed one) where there was only one speaker. That person was usually Tobias and never Severine. Eileen spoke with Severine and shouted at Tobias and Tobias, never a man to back down from asserting his superiority, returned the favour. The nature of their relationships meant that Sev never really knew very much about her parents beyond the facts she picked up from living and eating and breathing in the same space as them. She knew her mother was a witch and her father was a muggle labourer. She knew that they often had disagreements about everything. She knew they stayed together because of her. Because for all of their faults, Eileen and Tobias were honourable people who understood that a child needed a family and believed that a family meant a mother and a father together. No matter how much they might have grown to hate the idea of the other person occupying that role, they had morals and they upheld them, often at the expense of their own personal wellbeing.

!?&amp;%$ #

Sev didn't love Lily. She was fascinated by her. She was something exotic and other in Spinner's End of Cokeworth. She was bright and vivacious and bold and alive (_happy_) in dull, crumbling stacks of concrete, mortar and brick that blocked and caged the bright cerulean sky away until even it turned grey and leeched and dreary. Lily seemed to take that monotony and shear it away, like a sheep's winter coat until you were left feeling naked and vulnerable with the cold air on your skin, a peculiarly faint sense of loss at the back of your mind and a body moving as though its limbs are not its own, the unencumbered lightness feeling foreign and discombobulating. That's what Lily did. She made life _fun_. And for Sev, who had to watch what she said and what she did and where she did it every time she set foot through the door and heard the telly on and the low, gravelly rumble of Tobias in the sitting room, inevitably complaining about this or that on the news or in the warehouse or in the house itself, Sev could always expect a verbal lashing and sometimes even a physical one for imagined wrongs and fabricated grievances. She learned to shut the door like a soft sigh and step light as a cat up rickety stairs and past the creaky patch on the landing before her room. If Tobias didn't know she was gone then he didn't care to acknowledge her existence.

It was a strange equilibrium they had come to find themselves in and sometimes it grated for Sev who would visit Lily at home and _see_ love and kindness and ache at the sight of it. (for it. For want of it. For wanting to have it.) She always felt slightly wrong-footed on Evan's ground because she knew that what _they_ had was normal and yet she didn't know how to treat it or herself within it and it bothered her even more that her discomfort stood out, branding her as an outsider. She was too quiet and dour and skittish at loud noises and family dinners, the sound of a car in the driveway or the washing machine starting up with jangling bangs that felt to her as though the very beams of the house seemed to shake with it. She stared at food too hard and walked around the kitchen as though it were a museum exhibit, each machine on the counter a priceless relic of ancient creation.

Lily would grab things with abandon, a whirlwind of distracted energy, leaving the evidence of her hunger in her wake. She would slam doors with cheerful disregard, spill crumbs and sauces on the floor without batting an eyelash and scrape dishes and cups against each other as though they were made of wood instead of porcelain. And Sev would look on, shoulders stiff and neck tense, cautiously resting her hands on the edge of a table or chair and watching Lily like you would watch a storm from the comfort of a warm fire. Sev would often talk about the stories she'd read in the books Eileen had under the kitchen sink or in the basement or up in the attic, while Lily listened and focused on making some outrageously clashing combination of jam and beans on toast or grilled onion, tomato and chocolate chip sandwiches. Lily made positively gluttonous portions and never finished them, usually taking a few bites and then demolishing the bag of crisps or jar of licorice she'd taken with her. Sev would usually have some crisps but she stayed as far away from Lily's culinary experiments as she unobtrusively could.

!?&amp; #$%*

Sometimes, in the deep recesses of her soul, Sev allowed herself to think of Eileen as _Maman _and herself as _Severine_ in the way it was meant to be said, with the vowels all beautifully softened: the I becoming an elongated e that melted into a lonely, lovely end of longing and perdition, always uttered in that cultured, rakey purr Eileen had from smoking too many bulky, flaky cigars out the bedroom window during summers spent in France. A sweet history condensed into one faded, hazy, snippet of some Parisian gazette tucked into Eileen's cracked compact.


End file.
